A Look Back: Polly's Killer Was an Outcast Even on the Fringe

Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 4, 1998

Editor's note: Five years ago this week, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was abducted from her Petaluma home, triggering a nationwide hunt ending two months later with the arrest of Richard Allen Davis for kidnapping and murder.

The case created a national call for closer monitoring of career criminals like Davis.

Indeed, accounts of just what Davis was doing before the kidnapping have always been murky: Davis said he suddenly pulled into town the day of the kidnapping and took Polly in an alcoholic haze. Police say he had been spotted in Polly's neighborhood for weeks.

This story, compiled from notes taken just after Davis' 1993 capture, offers some impressions from the fringe characters he hung around with in the days leading up to the crime.

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The riverfront under Petaluma's Washington Street Bridge in fall 1993 was a refuge where down-and- outers could crash on soggy mattresses in the mud for the night. They knew they could ward off the chill with cheap wine and share some laughs free of the cops' flashlights. If trouble came, it was usually from some out-of-town drifter.

Richard Allen Davis was big trouble from out of town that fall, and he drifted to that bridge.

The response he got there in the weeks leading up to the night he kidnapped Polly Klaas on October 1 was the same he met at the drug den down the road and just a handful of blocks from Polly's home: fear, derision and then rejection.

Even for those so far out of luck they slept in the dirt or smoked methamphetamine behind ramshackle walls, a brush with the then- 39-year-old Davis jangled them.

The man whose name and thick, violent rap sheet became national news with his arrest that November had long before left an indelible impression among those on Petaluma's bottom end. And in a series of 1993 Chronicle interviews, they painted the portrait of a loser who didn't fit in even on the margins.

"He'd come down at night, start drinking MD20/20 -- you know, 'Mad Dog' wine," said Rick Martel, who had wound up under the bridge that fall after a series of bad breaks. "He was too freaky for them. When he drank, he'd get real ugly, and he'd start singing Creedence (Clearwater Revival) songs real loud and howling at the moon."

Once his face hit the front page, the lyrics Davis yowled beneath the stars suddenly assumed ominous portent: "I see a bad moon risin', I see trouble on the way," the song goes. ". . . Hope you are quite prepared to die . . . I hear the voice of rage and ruin."

Brad James sat amid the six filthy mattresses spread beneath the bridge one night with several pals and recalled how Davis "came to party" again and again that September.

"Mostly he liked to chase after the women here, young or old, didn't matter," said James. "We never saw him get one though. He was too freaky for them. Even the hookers.

"We knew he was an ex-con, but a lot of us down here are ex-cons so nobody cared," he said. "We just didn't like him. He was an a--."

Several beneath the bridge remembered Davis talking about wanting to rob banks. He wanted to find a boat to tool around the river. He liked vodka and bragging about prison life.

One of the other men, known as Tweak, spat in the mud. "We chased him off one night when we got sick of his s--, and it wasn't hard," he said. "He was a coward. A bully."

In the years leading to Davis being sentenced to death in 1996, investigators dredged up witnesses who recounted Davis' tortured childhood at the hands of a mother who abandoned him and a father who abused him. They learned that as a sadistic high school kid in La Honda, long before he pulled two prison stretches for kidnapping, he was already lighting cats on fire, drinking heavily and threatening kids with knives.

The homeless and the druggers Davis hung around -- the "tattoos and toothless crowd," one neighbor called it -- didn't need to know the details. It was clear enough.

"Maybe something happened to him once where someone hurt him sometime," said James. "I don't know. He was twisted by the time we met him. Maybe he just went nuts. Happens to a lot of us."

At the beat-up, beige house down the road known as the neighborhood speed den, Jimmy kicked a snarling dog out of the way as he stood in the doorway and recalled Davis coming around a couple times. He frowned.

Family folk and shop owners around the speed den and the rest of the area near Polly's house that fall later also remembered seeing Davis trudging through off and on for weeks before October 1. The massive tattoos coating his arms and his scowling, bearded face stood out.

So Davis' story to police that he had just blown into town October 1 to try to visit his estranged mother for the first time since being paroled from state prison in June drew quick laughter that fall from the other vagabonds who'd seen him. Their recollections were bolstered in the 1995-96 trial, when the prosecution contended that Davis stalked Polly for weeks before taking her.

"I would never forget that guy," Dave, one of the bridge dwellers, said with a chuckle. "I woke up one night and saw him standing over me holding a knife. We chased him off.